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“... those who were more obviously poor. Growing up amid what he calls in Vive Moi! ‘this half-grey life of the ambitious half-poor’, O’Faolain was, and should have remained, a perfect nationalist revolutionary. It was the ambitious half-poor – too well-off to be socialists, too poor to be contented with the limited opportunities offered by ...”

“... It can sometimes seem that the Second World War never stopped. Stephen Spender alluded recently in the London Review to the idea that it was simply a continuation of the First, but the ‘Thirty Years’ War’ view of 20th-century history has in turn to accommodate some of the later continuities of which one is reminded by both Mordecai Richler’s anthology and Ernestine Schlant and Thomas Rimer’s collection of essays ...”

“... a low-level castle, remaindered gothic. Better and better. The London Waste facility is battleship grey, a colour that is supposed to make it invisible in the prevailing climate: rain, exhaust fumes, collapsed skies. The expectation is that, on an average Edmonton morning, diesel fug and precipitation will disguise the 100-foot tower of the biggest incinerator ...”

“... had been expended to bring me to New Mexico, too, along with a group of other British writers – Stephen Spender, Richard Hoggart, Margaret Drabble, Al Alvarez – and various Beat American poets and novelists (California vintage ’57), and academics from different universities, to consider such issues as ‘D. H. Lawrence and his Influence on Modern ...”

“... gives me directions to Peckham Library. It is about three o’clock in the afternoon, on a steel-grey day two weeks after the death of Damilola Taylor. The centre of Peckham is thronged with police officers, all wearing high-visibility luminous yellow vests, and with equipment strapped around their waists on webbing belts, inflating the clothing around their ...”

“... history, of the novels and poems of the Thirties, is of the same kind. He has a strong feeling for Stephen Haggard’s novel Nya, which he happened to find a copy of during the war, and which he feels to be a forerunner of Lolita, giving sound professional reasons why Lolita won out and Nya vanished into limbo. What really matters, I suspect, is that Nya is ...”

“... salad, so we go into a fishmonger’s on Bleeker. A young, fat guy sits by the door, an old grey one at the back and, doing all the work, a Puerto Rican. K.: I want a dozen mussels. Fat Guy: We don’t sell them by the dozen. K.: How do you sell them? Fat Guy: Sell them by the pound. K.: OK. A pound. (Pause.) How many are there in a pound? Fat Guy ...”

“... wrecked for me in boyhood by rote-learning, a dislike for the pseudo-archaic ‘unhand me, grey-beard loon’, and by parodies; but now, having just finished Richard Holmes’s admirable Coleridge: Early Visions, I read it again, and very glad I am that I did so. The sea, the ship and her company may not belong to this world in any literal sense, but ...”

“... is usually acceptable only if it goes hand in hand with breeding (whence the popularity of Stephen Fry). Walcott does not fit the bill: he’s an outsider and an overreacher and his work betrays a definite lack of cool; it sparkles and it shines. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There is a 1936 recording of Ella Fitzgerald with Chick Webb and his ...”

“... the sad and a PR guru. There was Bach for Larkin and a bit of Bix Beiderbecke. Ten years later, at Stephen Spender’s wingding in St Martin-in-the-Fields, there was Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, an adagio from Haydn, a speech by Richard Wollheim, and no fewer than 13 of Spender’s own poems, read by Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Jill Balcon ...”

“... neatly captures the harsh reality of the promised land, its smugness and its outlook of permanent grey, booms and recessions notwithstanding. The notices outside guest-houses and cafés are manifestly hostile, and the faces on the advertising hoardings stare down reprovingly at the strangers. The family move out of a communal slum into a slum of their ...”

“... Misbehavin’’, ‘Keeping out of Mischief Now’, ‘Jitterbug Waltz’ and ‘Blue Turning Grey over You’, he still couldn’t have come close to satisfying the demands placed on him by his own success and the executives at RCA Victor.Waller’s band could readily produce great lyrical, instrumental recordings – ‘Blue Turning ...”

“... Norman Mailer, whose book was being launched. At other parties I saw Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Stephen Spender and others, writers whose work I knew but whose faces (like those of most other writers) did not resemble the photographs on their book jackets. I praised their work, I tried to make an impression, but my talk was seldom literary. I solicited ...”

“... must have seemed bright, and when things did alter it was practically overnight. 10 February. When Stephen Fry took off last year I came in for one or two of the jobs he’d been contracted to do, notably a couple of voice-overs for children’s cartoons. Telephoned by the same company last week I agree to do another in a Posy Simmons animated film about a pig ...”

“... Mayakovsky’s name on it, Number 12. On the left you see across a rope barrier a tiny room with a grey sofa, wooden desk and chair, antiquated telephone, bookcase, trunk, small table and an old rug. The paint is peeling, and over the desk, at eye level, there is a small photograph of Lenin. This is the room where Mayakovsky lived and where, on 14 April ...”